The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
At the event, President Yoweri Museveni challenged the leader to ensure compliance in the use of the bed nets.
“Stop using mosquito nets as wedding gowns and for fishing nets,” Museveni said.
To tackle the malaria challenge of resistance, Dr. Nathan Mulure who heads the East and South African Cluster of Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company which makes the anti-malaria drug Coartem, told the Independent that researchers need to conduct trials to get new tools to fight the infection.
This is so even as the country has previously invested in prevention methods like Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) in high prevalence areas in Northern Uganda and recently administering larvicides in valley dams to prevent breeding of malaria causing mosquitoes.
In 2015 and early 2016, the country had an unusual outbreak of malaria in areas that had once been declared free from the disease after an episode of the IRS intervention by the government a year before. The Ministry of Health had assured the public that with the spraying, the country was to completely eliminate the disease. They had argued that Dichloro-Diphenyl- Trichloroethane (DDT), a synthetic chemical used in IRS was particularly good at killing insects and that it would take many years for mosquitoes to breed again but suddenly people; especially children, got infected. Many even failed to respond to first line drug for complicated malaria – artesunate injection and coartem.
‘Threat of drug resistance’
What is happening in Uganda seems to be happening in other countries surveyed by the MalaFa study. Respondents said healthcare managers need to develop plans to address the looming drug resistance. They also noted that tracking of substandard and counterfeit medicines is a big problem since many people are exposed to unregulated medicines. They want countries to develop surveillance systems to track the speed at which this resistance to artemisinin – based combination therapies may be developing.
Mulure whose pharmaceutical is conducting studies on a new single dose malaria drug at sites in Tororo and Mbarara however said that even though the first line malaria drug have been resisted by a few people, tests still show the drug to have up to 90% efficacy.
Denis Kibira, the Executive Director HEPs Uganda, an organisation that coordinates all local NGOs doing malaria work, says even without going into expensive ventures like IRS spraying and other complicated treatments, the country can still make strides in achieving the malaria elimination targets if people do simple basic things like cutting the grasses around their households and clearing stagnant water which act as mosquito breeding grounds.
As it is now however, every two minutes a child dies of the disease globally, the majority of who are aged under five and live in Sub Saharan Africa. The disease costs the African economy more than $12billion every year and slows the economic growth of countries with high malaria rates by 1.3%.
He says people who take anti-malaria drugs without doing tests pose a danger to the malaria fight. He said basing on symptoms, such as fever and headache, alone to give people Coartem who do not have malaria could lead to resistance of the drug when they ever get infected. He said people who have malaria but fail to complete the dose because they feel better pose a worse danger.
“They will keep the drug and use it when they fall sick again,” he said, “Meanwhile the bug is getting exposed to sub optimal doses and soon it learns how to deal with them.”
